Healthy Me

My son's birthday weekend was great.  I felt good until Sunday evening so it all went fine.  Today, I'm not feeling too hot.  I'm beginning to wonder if I'll ever kick this bacteria.

Instead of going furniture shopping today, I went online window shopping since I don't feel good enough to walk around the furniture stores right now.  I am looking for a round coffee table.  I've had rectangular before but wanted to look at round coffee tables for a change. 

I found this Winsome Genoa Round Coffee Table with a Glass Top and a shelf underneath that looks like a good possibility.  The glass will prevent water stains when the kids leave their glasses on the table when I'm not around to march them back to the kitchen table.  Then again, there is a Winsome Timer Coffee Table that has both a shelf and a drawer in a rectangle shape.  I might go with a rectangular shape again but I really wanted to try something totally different.

Oh well, back to window shopping.

My son turns 11 today.  We are going to have a birthday dinner at the restaurant of his choice, movie of his choice and a party at home with a cake and ice cream (of course).  He's definitely maturing past the stage of Pokemon and stuff now because I thought he'd ask for something like a ps3 for his birthday but he asked for a Cajon instead. It's a box drum (look it up on YouTube...it's pretty cool).  Maybe he's saving the PS3 for his Christmas list.  He's probably going to hit us up for the big stuff when it comes from Santa.

We're planning a vacation this summer to visit family again.  I hope my transmission holds out for the trip because it would stink to be 300 miles away from home and have the car die.  I can't believe how expensive it is to have a transmission replaced on a vehicle.  It's not like I'm looking for Ferrari parts but still...$2000-$3000 to replace my transmission. I've never had to do it before and I'm hoping this one will hold out, rumbling and all, for a long time to come.  The mechanic said to drive it til it dies so that's what I'm doing. 

Like car problems and stress helps my health.  Geez.  It's neverending.

Well, it turns out my PID wasn't coming back.  I believe I picked up another infection through the hospital called C. difficile.  According to the Mayo Clinic:

Clostridium difficile, often called C. difficile or "C. diff," is a bacterium that can cause symptoms ranging from diarrhea to life-threatening inflammation of the colon.

You are at higher risk if:  you are in the hospital for two or more days (I was), if you take multiple antibiotics (hospital had me on Clindamycin and Gentamicin and then two others at home), and if you take Clindamycin (yup). 

At first, I thought it was just my digestive system messed up from all the antibiotics so I started taking probiotics.  That didn't give me relief and I felt like I was having IBS symptoms, which I don't have.  I had all the pain and digestive upset and was nauseous all the time.  I felt "off" all the time and anything I ate or drank had me cramping up.  Knowing I was just in the hospital and on antibiotics had me googling for information and I came across C. diff. pretty easily. 

The treatment is metronidazole (Flagyl) which I have and probiotics (which I'd already started taking because all those antibiotics messed me up).  I figured I'd try the script I already had and if I didn't feel better within a couple days, I'd go see my doctor.  Thankfully, the metronidazole is helping.  After two days, I'm improving.  Hopefully it goes away.  If it reoccurs, I'll go see my doctor.  I know I should've called him anyway but I'm just tired of doctors and the thought of any type of scopes or tools going "up there" for diagnosis - no way, no how.  I know what's wrong with me.  I don't need another big medical bill to tell me when the $700-$800 hospital bill from last month is already going to kill us.  I'm tired of being sick and doctors.

I have so much to do this summer with our four kids, hopefully a vacation next month if we can financially swing it, house painting and room updating (my oldest kid wants lockers in her room like one of her friends so I'm looking around at school furniture), and work to do, I don't have time to be sick all summer long. I've been sick for a month straight now and that's been plenty!

It's time for all these germs to take a hike!

Pains in my abdomen woke me up this morning from a sound (antiotic-induced) sleep.  Like before, I had a lot of pain and covered in sweat. 

I hope my PID isn't going to make a reoccurrence.  Once in this lifetime was more than enough for me.

Would you take a "before" picture (for weight loss) and post it on your blog for all the world to see? 

I have thought about it but I don't have the guts to do it.  Maybe if I knew that I'd for sure lose that weight or perhaps if it was going to be a quick weight loss goal because then I wouldn't have to worry that the "before" picture would be up there for so long!

I wouldn't want to see the "before" picture up there for six months.  With my problem managing my thyroid right now, it'd be my luck that it would be up there for the rest of the year and that would be just too depressing.

My husband did some more painting today in our living room.  It is about 3/4 done now for painting.  He let each kid roll a little bit so they could see what it was like.  Of course, I took pictures.  My husband wanted me to try it too (he doesn't "let" me paint because I leave big messes behind) so I did.  My daughter snapped a picture of me, in my pajamas, painting.  How awful it looked!  I looked like I should be looking up diet pill reviews instead of lazing about today reading and trying my hand at painting. Pictures tell the truth don't they? This picture was screaming: Lose some weight!!  It was just awful.

I've decided that photographs are just too honest.  I don't want my mug, or any other part of me, in a picture until the rest of this weight is gone!

What is a safe acne treatment for teenagers? I am careful about chemicals used in the house for cleaning and hygiene because my daughter and I both have asthma.  I am wondering if there is a natural acne treatment available, and inexpensive, to keep in the house for myself and my kids to use? 

I should look into making my own products.  I already do for general cleaning (vinegar and baking soda).  I wonder how hard it would be to make other household products naturally.  I've never heard of a green acne treatment but I'll bet you there is something out there.

While I was sick and my husband was off work taking care of me, he did some much-needed painting.  Here is a picture of part of our living room he just finished (ignore the pull-ups on the top of my armoire...you can tell kids live here):

Summer is unofficially here.  With the mid-80's to almost 90 temperatures are any indication, we skipped spring and went right into summer.  Sad for me because I love wearing boots and was hoping to extend my wear of them a little longer but it's just too warm. I'm not sure how my husband does it having to wear heavy, steel-toed boots to work the way he does in this heat without an air-conditioned work environment. 

I'm glad he does his own laundry for his work clothes.  I'd imagine those socks of his smell!

I don't do well in heat though so you won't catch me outside sunbathing in this sun!  I'd pass out.

My husband has been experiencing a lot of pain through his wrist up to his elbow.  They tried steriod pills and then moved to a cortisone shot (he said those hurt).  They're thinking a tennis elbow type of thing (from the repitition in his job and playing guitar most likely).  If not, it could be arthritis. 

I think he should be looking at http://www.jointsupplements.net/ to see if there are joint supplements he can take to see if they help. I'm not too crazy about repeated use of steroids. He's had cortisone shots for his knees before for pain (he used to race bicycles cross-country and then road racing and really stressed his knees out) so he's familiar with them.  I just hope it's not a cover for the problem instead of a solution.

Did you know one of the symptoms of thyroid disease is hair loss?  As a woman, this is important to know since thyroid disease affects women moreso than men.  I left behind hair everytime I showered.  Luckily, I have really thick hair so it wasn't noticeable to people in general (just my husband who hated all the hair in the shower). 

If you have hair loss that isn't attributed to thyroid disease, click here to see if there is anything that may help you. Because mine was due to my thyroid betraying me, the hair loss was helped with thyroid medications to regulate my hormones better. When my thyroid hormones get out of whack, I still can experience hair loss. It's a good indicator for me on when my thyroid needs attention and once that is taken care of, the hair loss stops.

I said I'd tell about my illness so here goes...

I was hospitalized due to a really bad case of Pelvic Inflammatory Disease (due to bacterial vaginosis...NOT a sexually transmitted disease which the doctors would not believe until the cultures came back proving neither myself nor my husband cheated on each other and gave each other a disease!). The doctors actually ticked both my husband and myself off with their disbelief that one of us must have had multiple partners which one of us got an STD from and that's what gave me PID.  The tests they did proved otherwise but it took a couple days for those tests to come back. We've been faithful to each other for 15 years and having that questioned was irritating!  I'm glad I had my cell phone with me because I was able to learn more about PID and the antibiotics they were giving me on the Internet through my phone. Thank the gods for technology because the doctor was driving me batty!

I was really sick with high fever and extreme pain with the possibility of abcessing. They gave me morphine in the ER for pain, then dilaudid (I think that's how it's spelled) once admitted, then Percocet as the pain went down. Apparently, the flu I thought I had with fever for four days a few weeks ago was the start of the infection raging through my reproductive organs until they were screaming at me to get to the hospital.

Unfortunately, the antibiotics (Gentamicin and Clindamycin) they had me on had such bad side effects (dizziness, nausea, ear pain and hallucinations) that I was happy to get off them after 2-1/2 days when I got sent home. Those side effects lingered for several days after but they eventually worked their way out of my system thankfully. I think it was the Gentamicin that did all that to me. The faces flying at me in my head were bad enough (and the evil grins some of the faces gave me were downright scary) but when the Virgin Mary statue outside my hospital window turned and looked at me several times, I rang for the nurse to get me off the medications!

So that's some of what happened.  There's more to chat about (the CT scan results) but I'll do that later.